Dante Alighieri. Inferno.

Dante Alighieri. Inferno. Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander, intro, and notes Robert Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio. Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander, intro, and notes Robert Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

These two volumes of texts, translations, notes, and other pedagogical materials constitute a distillation of Professor Robert Hollander's many years of teaching Dante at Princeton. Over nearly four decades, his course on the Comedy has become such an institution for generations of students there that it has even been reprised as part of the university's annual reunion celebrations. Though it gets ftrst billing in the books' titles, the translation of the poem's first two canticles into English--produced in collaboration with Hollander's wife, the poet Jean Hollander--is only one part of the Hollanders' project to provide as broad an audience as possible with a reliable guide to the reading of Dante's poem in the original. As evidence of this, and in an unusual act of generosity for copyright holders, much of what is found in these volumes, plus other material as well, has been made available in electronic form at the Princeton Dante Project website (www.princeton.edu/dante) where anyone can read the Hollanders' work for free. This site also contains audios of readings of the poem in Italian by Professor Lino Pertile which provide English-language readers unsure of the pronunciation of a particular word in Dante's text--or even of how the original sounds at all--with a sense of the oral dimension of Dante's work.

Each of the Hollanders' two volumes of Dante's poem features the Italian text of the canticle in Petrocchi's edition with the English translation on facing pages. At the beginning of the Inferno, there is a brief introduction to Dante and his poem aimed at the general reader. In this introduction, Hollander stresses the originality, fierce independence, even contrarian nature of Dante's attitude to his material (of his depiction of Beatrice, for example, Hollander notes that Dante, "knows that what he is proposing is out of bounds," xvii). But the principal thrust of Hollander's presentation of the man and his work is to insist that Dante's is a poem of great relevance to life today written by someone who, if not exactly like most people living right now, has nevertheless much of importance to say to, for example, undergraduates in North America in the twenty-first century.

Hollander provides some of the usual help to these readers. There are maps of the topography of both Hell and Purgatory and a tabular description of events in Inferno with names of the rivers and of the monsters that characterize that region. Each volume has two indexes, one to names and places mentioned in the poem, the second an "Index of Subjects Treated in Notes." In the latter, in the Inferno volume, one can fred references to "speech" ("garbled," "least present in a canto," "most present in a canto"), while for both canticles there is a reference to different kinds of "similes" ("comparing a thing to itself," "describing mental experience," etc. for Purgatorio). At the end of each volume, a "List of Works Cited" provides complete biographical information for the scholarly works mentioned in the notes. Though these references, in general, are to the most recent, twentiethcentury opinions about the poem, the notes also make use of earlier commentaries (from Jacopo Alighieri's of 1322 to that by Pasquini-Quaglio of 1982, with nineteen of these from before 1600). For the complete texts of such often hard to find commentaries, Hollander refers the reader to the database collected in the Dartmouth Dante Project, also available on-line at an address he provides.As this "outsourcing" of his scholarly resources makes clear, the Doubleday volumes are only one part of a complex of collectively produced philological and historical tools that Hollander is proposing to information age readers who are often as comfortable in front of a TV monitor as they are perusing the printed page.

Each canto in the two volumes is preceded by a helpful "outline" to the action, with subdivisions and, in Purgatorio, at least, different type fonts and other formatting devices for additional clarity. While these formal matters are important and the very lucid organization of these volumes is a large part of their considerable merit, the greatest contribution the Hollanders make to facilitating comprehension of Dante by English-speaking readers are Robert Hollander's excellent and copious notes. In them, Hollander is not only sharing his own private thoughts on the text after many years of careful study, he is also drawing on as many years of patient responses to student questions and even arguments about the poem. In many of the notes, you can almost see Professor Hollander interrupting his lecture to call on a student in the back of the room who has raised an insistent hand. In several, in fact, he credits his students, identifying them by name and Princeton class, for particularly helpful readings of passages that seem to require extra elucidation. As those who have read his books and essays about Dante know, Hollander has definite opinions about the controversies that have grown up about Dante's text. In these notes, however, he is careful to present all sides of contested matters and then either leave his readers to draw their own conclusions, or provide evidence for his personal views by reference to his longer and more detailed scholarly work elsewhere.

Deriving as in many cases they did from classroom discussions, some of these notes contain what certain readers may find unsettling--or at least unconventional--references to contemporary culture. In his exposition of the poem, Hollander tries to bring home what he is saying by reference not just to those Latin classics that Dante knew, the Bible, and the patristic tradition, but also to Samuel Beckett (Purg. 83), the Marx Brothers (Purg. 527), Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Bridges (Purg. 213), hathand poker (Purg. 252), Scorsese's Apocalypse Now (Inf. 486), and behavior at boozy New Year's Eve celebrations (speaking oflnferno XXXI, the note points out that in this canto "Virgil treats Nimrod like a drunk at a New Year's Eve party, telling him to give over attempts at speech and content himself with blowing his horn," Inferno 532).

Hollander's work here is clearly aimed--as Dorothy Sayers's had been for readers of an earlier day in another country with different religious traditions and a different class structure--at contemporary readers in the US today, whether these are devout Catholics versed in Thomistic theology, Protestants, Christian fundamentalists, Jews, Moslems, atheists, or skeptics with varying degrees of sympathy for Dante's endeavor. While the Doubleday volumes will be consulted profitably by other Dante scholars, their principal audience would seem to be non-specialist readers of goodwill but perhaps more modest cultural preparation who need some help if they are to make sense of Dante's accomplishment in the light of today's many competing and very different teleological systems.

The translation, which proceeds tercet-by-tercet and often line-by-line, should, I believe, be considered a kind of additional "note" to the poem rather than a competing text. While elegant and precise and eminently "sayable," in a way that Jean Hollander declared Sinclair's not to be when this husband and wife team began the project, this Englishing of Dante's words has not been conceived as a stand-alone work of are any more than Sinclair's or Singleton's (the acknowledged predecessors for their project) were. It is thus conceptually unlike such other translations of Dante as, to take two much-read works over the last century, those by Longfellow or Ciardi. For this reason, to compare--as other reviewers have done--what the Hollanders have done with other recent English versions of the poem is to miss the point of what they are up to. Their aim is not to compete with Dante but to lead readers to the poem and from the poem to reflection on their own experience of the world today. This is why the books are called Inferno and Purgatorio and not "Hell" and "Purgatory."

What the Hollanders have done does not fail to suggest a certain sense of lacrimae rerum in the reader. Despite the considerable merit of their labors, theirs--like all translations-- must be seen as transitory, certain to be replaced by another commentary in a few years or a few decades whose readers who will find the references to Martin Scorsese, homosexual "cruising," the Marx Brothers, and the rest merely quaint, when not in need of notes themselves. But for the moment--however fleeting this moment may be--this affable but responsible, erudite but flexible companion to Dante's poem is certainly the best available guide in English to the poem, especially for new, possibly young, reading pilgrims in need of a "Virgil" to help them on their way.

In conclusion, one cannot help but wish the Hollander team patience and fortitude in their work on the concluding volume of the Paradiso. It should also be noted that while at $35 each the books will be considered a bargain for many, one hopes that paperback editions more accessible to students will be made available soon. These axe books that are going to be read and studied everywhere.

CHARLES KLOPP

The Ohio State University